5 Responses

I’d like to highlight one point you make about selecting the appropriate strategy because confusion exists about what a strategy is, even outside UX where perhaps strategy is better understood.

It often seems to be misunderstood that a strategy is the approach taken to meet a set of goals and not the goal itself. I see organisations adopting Lean UX as a goal not a strategy for delivering on a goal.

I recently had lunch with a client contact who runs a large global UX team and we were discussing the tension he was experiencing between the resource capability he was being allowed to build and what he felt he needed. I put it to him that the company appeared to be taking a ‘fast second’ strategic approach to UX and that was perhaps why he had the shape of team he did.

We debated this for some time and came to the conclusion it was a perfectly valid strategy for the user experience they wanted and needed to deliver to remain competitive in the market they occupied. The issues of course are that the strategy is either unconscious or hasn’t been communicated and more than that, may not suit the person tasked with implementing it who is more creative and less operational.

I think this highlights a number of the key challenges with UX strategy as it grows in understanding and importance.

Great retrospective on UX strategy, Jon. Interesting highlights and good supporting info. As I read the conclusion, it sounded like the primary theme is the rise and recognition of design, in part due to the success of Apple and Steve Jobs, and that we should recognize the ‘value of the inclusive and holistic perspective of design.’ This seems to imply that UX strategy lives within design, and I don’t think that is the case. UX strategy, at least as it is expressed at UX STRAT events, is a new focus on the combination of business strategy and experience design, enabled by advances in technology and customer data capture and analysis. Design is definitely at the party, but it’s not design’s party. Any discussion of UX strategy should involve Michael Porter as much as it does Steve Jobs.

Thanks for the comments. My references to Steve Jobs are simply because he is so well known as the former leader of a company that made UX part of its successful business strategy. How many movies has Hollywood made on the impact of Michael Porter? How many people outside of those who read HBR know his name?

I personally am a big fan of Porter’s work, and some of my early talks on UX Strategy here at local venues in the valley included citations of his work. That said, Liam and I realized quickly that talking about both UX and strategy is a lot to cover at once and so references to Porter’s work were dropped.

We kept references to Drucker, Christensen, Kim and Mauborgne, Kaplan and Norton, Grove, and other business strategy authors because we felt their work was applicable to our intended audience/material.

I personally find my self referencing Christensen when working with clients on product strategy more than any of the others.

As for UX strategy not being design’s party–that’s part of a bigger topic I’d love to debate with you sometime. I’m sure Liam would love to join us. Perhaps at UX STRAT next year.

Great write up!
Was just looking for a good motivational piece on why UX has gotten so hot.

Question, you reference your efforts at CHI and UPA from early 2000’s, can you point out the exact talks or papers were the discussing of what became UX strategy started? (for scholarly citation purposes)

Liam and I are not academics so we didn’t publish our initial work in an academic journal. We did run workshops for practitioners at CHI, UPA (now UXPA) and User Friendly (the big Chinese UX conference).

One of the challenges is academic conferences like CHI often have criteria for papers that require experimental data (I’m a past reviewer for both CHI & UPA, now UXPA) that makes this type of submission unacceptable. Our work is based on real world experience in some of Silicon Valley’s largest product oriented companies, but it’s not technical the results of a controlled experiment.

About the authors

Jon Innes is a UX consultant with 20 years of experience working with large companies and startups in Silicon Valley. Jon and Liam Friedland ran the first UPA workshop on the topic of UX strategy. Since then he has held numerous UX strategy workshops at conferences and for corporate clients. Twitter: @innes_jon